Valerie Wilson

Director, Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy

Biography
Valerie Rawlston Wilson is director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy (PREE), a nationally recognized source for expert reports and policy analyses on the economic condition of America’s people of color. Prior to joining EPI, Wilson was an economist and vice president of research at the National Urban League Washington Bureau, where she was responsible for planning and directing the bureau’s research agenda. She has written extensively on various issues impacting economic inequality in the United States—including employment and training, income and wealth disparities, access to higher education, and social insurance—and has also appeared in print, television, and radio media. In 2010, through the State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs, she was selected to deliver the keynote address at an event on Minority Economic Empowerment at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway. In 2011, Wilson served on a National Academies Panel on Measuring and Collecting Pay Information from U.S. Employers by Gender, Race, and National Origin.

Education
Ph.D., Economics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Introduction and key findings
Income inequality and slow growth in the living standards of low- and moderate-income Americans have become defining features of today’s economy, and at their root is the near stagnation of hourly wage growth for the vast majority of American workers.

This paper describes why the Federal Reserve Bank should be fully public and proposes a set of sensible and nonpartisan legislative actions to create that change and enhance public accountability and transparency.

Analyses of state unemployment rates by race and ethnicity for the most recent quarter build on the monthly state employment numbers by showing state-by-state improvements in prospects for black and Latino workers, yet continued high unemployment relative to whites.

In 2032, people of color will become a majority of the American working class, defined as people without a college degree. Since nearly two-thirds of the U.S. labor force is working class, policies aimed at raising working class living standards are critical to tackling wage stagnation and economic inequality. Working people from diverse groups must recognize that they share more in common than not, and work together to achieve a higher minimum wage, universal high-quality child care, criminal justice reform, and other overlapping goals.

An ambitious national investment in early childhood care and education would provide high societal returns. American productivity would improve with a better-educated and healthier future workforce, inequality would be immediately reduced as resources to provide quality child care are progressively made available to families with children, and the next generation would benefit from a more level playing field that allows for real equality of opportunity.

Although the explicitly discriminatory policies and practices that created these disparities are now illegal—thanks in part to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed employment and pay discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin—the inequities persist. That’s because many of the channels through which opportunity is passed, like social networks, are shaped by biases based on race and gender. Regardless of whether these biases are conscious or subconscious, patterns of old-fashioned segregation stand in the way of eradicating them. Recently, I gained some profound insight into this phenomenon from a most unlikely place: a second-grade music class

The black unemployment rate is nearly or more than twice the white unemployment rate regardless of educational attainment. It is, and always has been, about twice the white unemployment rate; however, the depth of this racial inequality in the labor market rarely makes the headlines.

In September 2015, the national unemployment rate was 5.1 percent, down 0.2 percentage points since the end of the second quarter in June 2015. Yet even as the recovery moves ahead slowly, conditions vary greatly across states and across racial and ethnic groups.

In early 2014, the private sector finally returned to its pre-Great Recession level of employment. Last year was also a turning point for the public sector, which added 74,000 jobs after experiencing losses throughout the recession and most of the recovery.

Today’s Census Bureau report on income, poverty and health insurance coverage in 2014 shows that with the exception of non-Hispanic white households, median household incomes were not statistically different from 2013.

On Wednesday, the Census Bureau will release the latest data on income, poverty, and health insurance coverage. As EPI’s research team eagerly awaits this release, there are a few things we will be watching for.

While it is evident that the overall rate of workers holding multiple jobs has decreased, a disparity emerges when this data is broken out by gender—namely, that working multiple jobs is something more prevalent among women, and young women in particular.

In January of this year, I projected that the black unemployment rate would reach single digits by mid-2015. That happened this month as job growth of 223,000 in April was more in line with the monthly average in 2014.

Even as the recovery moves ahead slowly, conditions vary greatly across states and across racial and ethnic groups. In March, state unemployment rates ranged from a high of 7.7 percent in the District of Columbia to a low of 2.6 percent in Nebraska. Nationally, African Americans had the highest unemployment rate, at 10.1 percent, followed by Latinos (6.8 percent), whites (4.7 percent), and Asians (3.2 percent).

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to present findings from my recent report, The Impact of Full Employment on African American Employment and Wages, at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Full Employment forum.

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EPI is an independent, nonprofit think tank that researches the impact of economic trends and policies on working people in the United States. EPI’s research helps policymakers, opinion leaders, advocates, journalists, and the public understand the bread-and-butter issues affecting ordinary Americans.